1999 – I Use Several Bodies

It was also the name of an exhibition at Galería Trinta in Santiago de Compostela.

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In Book, a book about self-referentiality from 2022 I wrote this reflection on the work:

For an exhibition at the turn of the century I made a T-shirt with the phrase ‘I USE SEVERAL BODIES’ printed across the chest. Still some mornings, as I lie in bed entering the world of the awakened, I amuse myself by thinking about the polysemy of the phrase, speculating about the usufructuary of those bodies. Is it the wearer of the T-shirt that uses several bodies, in an obscene suggestion of sexual exploitation? Is it the T-shirt that uses them, when it goes around the world not only with the body that wears it, but also with the bodies of those to whom the owner lends it? Or is it this model of the T-shirt as a work of art, of which I made a hundred copies, that wears a hundred bodies? Or is it perhaps the T-shirt, that item of clothing that has displaced shirts and polo shirts in all situations, that now wears millions of bodies around the world to become even more fashionable? Maybe it is me, the author of the T-shirt, who uses the bodies of those who bought the T-shirt, or those who received it as a gift, to advertise myself, so that my fame as an artist reaches places I would not otherwise have access to (I may be using the T-shirt for that, several of those T-shirts, as I use the bodies). But also, the phrase itself uses several bodies to enunciate itself in several places, to show itself to passers-by who are impelled to read it, to represent in their minds that image, of a T-shirt, or of a guy they passed in the street, that of a phrase or of an author, any of them using several bodies. Foucault makes reflections of this kind in the first part of This Is Not a Pipe with regard to René Magritte’s painting – reflections that, according to Guido Almansi, the audacious author of the prologue, Magritte himself was too naïve to contemplate.